Senator Baucus Disposes

After months of stupid delay, while even stupider "negotiations" with Republican Senate obstructionists produced precisely zero, Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus expelled a giant legislative fart all over Capitol Hill today, otherwise known as "The Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act of 2009."

No Republican on the Finance Committee supports it, and, turns out, that's a useful thing. An even better thing is that progressive Democratic senators on the committee are already lining up against it. Sen. Jay Rockefeller has so far expressed the bluntest disdain, but senators John Kerry and Ron Wyden are also grumbling. Those three Democratic votes would be more than enough to kill the bill, which is what needs to happen.

Shuler Mad at Democrats in His District

Heath Shuler of the NC-11 reportedly held a meeting with Democratic Party leaders in Haywood County that reportedly turned rather ugly. Seems that those Democratic loyalists were pressing Shuler on why he was such a g.d. Blue Dog and wouldn't support a public option for health insurance. Shuler has shown flashes of irritation before with Democrats who just don't seem to understand that a Blue Dog hears a different whistle.

Shuler's name is now the first signature on a letter that Blue Dogs wrote to Henry Waxman demanding that certain language in H.R.3200 that PhRMA doesn't like be changed to language that PhRMA likes much better because (hey!) PhRMA wrote it after Billy Tauzin and other big drug company wheeler-dealers had a meeting with Rahm Emanuel and the President during which a bribe of $150 million was offered by PhRMA to promote the president's health-care "reform," so long as that "reform" did not include any price controls on the drug industry. Matt Taibbi has the inside scoop.

So guess what? Heath Shuler is about to be the recipient of some pro-Heath Shuler advertising by PhRMA, in appreciation for his service to killing real reform.

And actual Democrats are left wondering just how are we better off with corporate interests buying our guys just as assiduously as they bought the other guys.

The Alternative: Rabid White People?

For all Glenn Beck and Fox News could gin up, they got a fraction of the 2 million they had hoped for Saturday in D.C. (60,000 - 70,000 actually showed up, according to official estimates by the Washington Fire Dept.). But they were rabid. And lied, incidentally, about their numbers. Of course. Wouldn't you? (More good pics on Scrutiny Hooligans, along with news that promoters of the 9/12 protest used Obama inauguration photos to bolster their claims of 2 million screaming meanies.)

Conservative writer David Frum summed up the current conservative fringe in the Republican Party as a combo of "wild accusations" and "paranoid delusions" arising from "the fever swamps." And he thinks it ain't helping the Republican Party get back on its electoral feet.

Meanwhile, in Raleigh, the John Locke Foundation/Civitas Institute/John William Pope Conglomerate for Doctoring the News hosted a Conservative Leadership Conference which featured (and we're not making this up) a keynote address by deposed beauty queen Carrie Prejean, whose talents include posing topless and opposing gay marriage. The Civitas Institute has been a bit vague on attendance, claiming "hundreds" who were hungry for the philosophical stylings of Miss Prejean, but our inside snitches say they barely hit 200, and several of those paying customers were some young progressive infiltrators from Durham doing oppo.

I dunno. With numbers like these, the Republican Party could hold a really loud, well attended national convention ... which is maybe all they want. Because, clearly, they don't want to attract actual voters.

Sam Walton, With the Skin of Flint

Hat-tip: C.D. Our thanks for this piece of memory about the founder of Wal-Mart, via BoingBoing:

Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million -- a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.

Walton was furious. The mechanization of agriculture had finally reached the backwaters of the Ozark Plateau, where he was opening one store after another. The men and women who had formerly worked on small farms suddenly found themselves redundant, and he could scoop them up for a song, as little as 50 cents an hour. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues did not exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure.

Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.

The Company She Keeps

Sen. Kay Hagan was one of 16 Blue Dog Dems in the U.S. Senate summoned to the White House this p.m. for a meeting with President Obama (ABC is reporting).

Quite the list of frail reeds (and a few who ought to be ashamed to be clumped up with any kind of obstruction): Senators Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Mark Warner of Virginia, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Tom Carper of Delaware, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, and Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Angry White Boys Club

That's yeller-out Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) in the middle of the picture, leaning forward. Rep. Patrick McHenry (NC-10), busily tweeting, is sitting three slots to Wilson's right.

As for Rep. Wilson's open contempt for the president, fellow South Carolinian and House Majority Whip James Clyburn said, "Joe is very confrontational. He held his first town hall meeting three blocks from my house at my kid's high school. Now why would he have this town hall meeting in my congressional district, three blocks from my house in my kid's high school? It's not in his district. That's the kind of guy Joe Wilson is. He loves confronting people. So he was confronting the president, just as he was confronting me."

"Joe Wilson took our state's reputation to a new low. I thought Mark Sanford had taken it as low as it could go, but this is beyond the pale," Clyburn said.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said that in the eight hours after Wilson's outburst, his Democratic opponent, former-Marine Rob Miller, has received nearly 3,000 individual grassroots contributions raising approximately $100,000.

Wilson wasn't the only one openly displaying contempt. A group of Republican back-benchers kept waving sheafs of paper at the President during standing ovations (the 95 Theses perhaps), and other prominent Republicans were seen on camera tweeting away or scanning their Blackberries. It was like 6th period Study Hall, probably including the spitballs and audible farts.

These are the alleged adults who fervently hope their antics will convince the American people to put them back in charge of government.

FOOTNOTE
Dana Milbank reports that Patrick McHenry got up and left the House chamber before the speech was over, apparently late for a meeting of the Tiny Weasel Caucus.

Elaine Marshall Is In

N.C. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall has filed paperwork to create a campaign committee for a run for the U.S. Senate seat currently warmed by Dick Burr.

This announcement will probably clear the field of many potential rivals, as Marshall will be formidable in any primary.

She has, for example, been consistently the top Democratic vote-getter in Watauga County whenever she's on the ballot.

Foxx Laughs at the 5th District

Back safely in D.C. yesterday, far away from any constituents who might confront her in a parking lot or otherwise disturb her townhall-free summer vacation, Madam Doctor Virginia Foxx said on the floor of the U.S. House, "Mr. Speaker, it was a long, hot August for many members of Congress who returned home to face the displeasure of constituents fed up with Washington's tin ear syndrome. Over the past month I have heard from more people than I can count who have had enough of the explosion of Washington-style big government."

If your voice wasn't anti health-care reform, she didn't hear you. She didn't even hear you if you agreed with her, because she wasn't listening to anyone but her own inner demons. That line, "I have heard from more people than I can count," is just a bald-faced lie.

The Pleasures of Flapping Laundry

We'd rather see a backyard line full of laundry flapping in the breeze than a row of laundromat driers turning like cement-mixers in the flat glare of florescent lighting.

What happened in the last decades to make our soulless yuppies decide that air-dried laundry was some sort of affront to good taste and property values? Sez a real estate agent in Hendersonville, N.C., which has more than its share, apparently, of upscale developments that have banned by local law the outdoor drying of laundry, "It starts to look like a tenement."

In our eyes, flapping laundry looks like human life on a human scale, a savings, a freshness in the closet. This late 20th-century uppityness about "tenement" life is frankly unamerican, not to mention self-defeating.

A law introduced in the N.C. General Assembly this year would have overturned local bans on hanging laundry, but it died:

An effort in North Carolina spearheaded by Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, and backed by other lawmakers including Rep. Susan Fisher, D-Buncombe, made progress this year but died before the General Assembly adjourned last month.

Harrison first tried to go after homeowner covenants, but as opposition mounted, she substituted a bill that would have limited only city and county ordinances. Her proposal passed the House but was rejected by a Senate committee.

The Asheville Citizen-Times story linked above offers hope, nevertheless, that a citizens' uprising is happening among homeowner associations and neighborhood groups to overturn stupid local rules and Victorian squeamishness. Let the laundry flap!

Hanging laundry is aesthetically pleasing (never mind the savings in electricity and all the other environmental benefits). We remember an art installation on Sanford Mall, probably back in the early '80s, when the Appalachian State University administration allowed a faculty artist to install several clotheslines and hang a wonderful assortment of clothing and linens, all carefully chosen for color, texture, and form. The installation stayed up a few days and filled our heads with memories of home and childhood and "washing day," before some high-falutin' prude complained and the whole thing was removed.

Bring back the clotheslines!

American poet Richard Wilbur captured for us the beauties of wind and damp laundry. He saw in the moving forms the presence of angels:

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.

("Love Calls Us To the Things of This World")

Sometimes there's no antidote to stupid law like poetry.